mask

32 Articles

The Goalie Mask, Reenvisioned

April 26, 2023 by 12 Comments

The goalie mask, at least the retro-styled fiberglass types from the 60s and 70s, hasn’t been used in hockey for about 50 years —  it’s instead made many more appearances in horror movies than on ice rinks. Since then, though, there’s been very little innovation surrounding the goalie mask even though there’s much more modern technology that could theoretically give them even greater visibility. [Surjan Singh] is hoping to use his engineering and hockey backgrounds to finally drive some improvements.

The “uncage” is based on Dyneema thread, a polyethylene fiber known for its strength and durability. It’s often used in applications that demand high strength with minimal weight, such as for sails or backpacking equipment. Using strands of Dyneema woven through a metal support structure is what gives this mask its high strength while also improving the visibility through it dramatically. [Surjan] has been prototyping this design extensively, as there were some issues with the fibers chafing on attachment points on the metal frame, but most of these issues have been ironed out or are being worked on currently.

In the meantime, [Surjan] has been looking for a professional-level goalie to help refine his design further and does seem to have some interest, but it doesn’t seem to have progressed past testing in the more controlled test environments yet. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine this as the future of goalie masks in professional hockey though since some innovation after 50 years of relative stagnation seems to be due. For something more accessible to those of us not currently playing in the NHL, though, you can wheel, snipe, and celly on this air hockey table instead.

Continue reading “The Goalie Mask, Reenvisioned” →

Circuit-less PCB Featured As Faceplate For A Digital Clock

August 17, 2022 by 9 Comments

If there’s no circuitry on a printed circuit board, does it cease being a “PCB” and perhaps instead become just a “PB”?

Call them what you will, the fact that PCBs have become so cheap and easy to design and fabricate lends them to more creative uses than just acting as the wiring for a project. In this case, [Jeremy Cook] put one to work as the faceplate for his “742 Clock,” a name that plays on the fact that his seven-segment display is 42 mm tall, plus it’s “24/7” backward.

In addition to the actual circuit board that holds the Wemos ESP32 module and the LEDs, a circuit-less board was designed with gaps in the solder mask to act as light pipes. Sandwiched between the boards is a 3D printed mask, to control the light and direct it only through the light pipes. [Jeremy] went through a couple of iterations of diffuser and mask designs, finally coming up with a combination that works well and looks good. He mentions a possible redesign of the faceplate board to include a copper backplane for better opacity, which we think is a good idea. We’d also like to see how different substrates work; would boards of different thickness or using FR-4 with different glass transition temperatures work better? Check out the video below and see what you think.

We’re seeing more and more PCBs turn up as structural elements, from enclosures to control panels and even tools, and we approve of this trend. But what we really approve of is what [Jeremy] did here by making this clock just a dumb display that gets network time over NTP. Would that all three digital clocks in our kitchen did the same thing — maybe then they wouldn’t each be an infuriating minute out of sync with the others.

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Used Facemasks Turned Into Rapid Antigen Tests With Injection Molding

March 24, 2022 by 15 Comments

Here’s a little eye-opener for you: next time you’re taking a walk, cast your eyes to the ground for a bit and see how far you can go without spotting a carelessly discarded face mask. In our experience, it’s no more than a block or two, especially if you live near a school. Masks and other disposal artifacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have turned into a menace, and uncounted billions of the things will be clogging up landfills, waterways, and byways for decades to come.

Unless they can be recycled into something useful, of course, like the plastic cases used for rapid antigen tests. This comes to us by way of [Ric Real] from the Design and Manufacturing Futures lab at the University of Bristol in the UK. If any of this sounds or looks familiar, refer back to October when the same team presented a method for turning old masks into 3D printer filament. The current work is an extension of that, but feeds the polypropylene pellets recovered from the old masks into a desktop injection molding machine.

The injection molding machine is fitted with 3D-printed molds for the shells of lateral flow devices (LFD) used for COVID-19 rapid antigen testing. The mold tooling was designed in Fusion 360 and printed on an Elegoo Mars MSLA printer using a high-strength, temperature-resistant resin. The molds stood up to the manual injection molding process pretty well, making good-quality parts in the familiar blue and white colors of the starting material. It’s obviously a proof of concept, but it’s good to see someone putting some thought into what we can do with the megatonnes of plastic waste generated by the pandemic response.

Display Your Speech In Realtime To Help Lipreaders In The Mask Era

January 23, 2022 by 18 Comments

Masks are all well and good when it comes to reducing the spread of deadly pathogens, but they can make it harder to understand people when they speak. They also make lipreading impossible. [Kevin Lewis] set about building something to help.

The system consists of a small screen that can be worn on the chest or other part of the body, and a lapel microphone to record the wearer’s speech. Using the Deepgram AI speech recognition API running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the system decodes the speech and displays it on the Hyperpixel screen.

The API is quite capable, and can be set to only respond to the wearer’s voice, or in a group mode, display speech from multiple people in the area, displaying other voices in another colour. There’s also a translation feature using the iTranslateApp API as well.

It’s a neat tool that could be of great use in conferences or in situations where a quick simple machine translation could majorly ease communication. Video after the break.
Continue reading “Display Your Speech In Realtime To Help Lipreaders In The Mask Era” →

Portable VO2 max measurment mask

Printable Portable Mask Gives You The Numbers On Your Workout

January 16, 2022 by 7 Comments

We’re currently in the midst of New Year’s Resolutions season, which means an abundance of spanking new treadmills and exercise bikes. And one thing becomes quickly obvious while using those machines: the instruments on them are, at best, only approximately useful for measuring things like your pulse rate, and in the case of estimating the calories burned by your workout, are sometimes wildly optimistic.

If precision quantification of your workout is your goal, you’ll need to monitor your “VO2 max”, a task for which this portable, printable mask is specifically designed. This is [Robert Werner]’s second stab at a design that senses both pressure differential and O2 concentration to calculate the maximum rate of oxygen usage during exercise. This one uses a commercially available respirator, of the kind used for painting or pesticide application, as the foundation for the build. The respirator’s filter elements are removed from the inlets to provide free flow of air into the mask, while a 3D printed venturi tube is fitted to its exhaust port. The tube houses the pressure and O2 sensors, as well as a LiPo battery pack and an ESP32. The microcontroller infers the volume of exhaled air from the pressure difference, measures its O2 content, and calculates the VO2 max, which is sent via Bluetooth to a smartphone running an exercise tracking app like Zwift or Strava.

[Robert] reports that his $100 instrument compares quite well to VO2 max measurements taken with a $10,000 physiology lab setup, which is pretty impressive. The nice thing about the design of this mask is how portable it is, and how you can take your exercise routine out into the world — especially handy if your fancy exercise bike gets bricked.

Extreme Canine Mask For Protection From Foxtails

July 4, 2021 by 33 Comments

Our canine partners are fortunately not affected by the current global pandemic, but it turns out there are other dangers that might necessitate them to wearing masks: Foxtail seeds. After getting a $400 vet bill for extracting a foxtail from his dog, [Hildeguard]’s ear, [Amos Dudley] decided to take the threat seriously and made her a form-fitting 3D printed mask.

The only commercial solution [Amos] could find was the “OutFox Field Guard”, which is a $50 vinyl-coated mesh bag that covers the dog’s entire head. It had the unfortunate side effects of causing some other dogs to try and rip it off and does not allow easy access to the mouth for treats or balls. [Hilde]’s custom mask was designed in CAD after creating a rough 3D scan of her head with an iPhone app. The bottom is open to allow [Hilde] to freely use her mouth, while the nose and ears holes are covered with mesh. Custom heat-formed polycarbonate lenses cover the eye holes. The mask itself was printed using Draft resin, and the inside was padded with a thin layer of foam. It might also be possible to create a silicone version using a 3D-printed mold. The top features an integrated GoPro mount, and we can’t help but wonder what other electronic upgrades could be fitted to this sci-fi-looking mask.

In the field, the mask worked well and did not seem to bother [Hilde]. Unfortunately, it did not solve the problem of other dogs trying to rip it off at the park, so for the moment [Amos] is only using it for more solitary activities like hiking.

It doesn’t look like [Amos] is struggling in that department, but if you need some help burning of your dog’s energy, you can always built them a 3D printed automatic ball launcher.

 

A Surefire Way To Make Masks

January 15, 2021 by 41 Comments

By now, the wearing of a facemask to protect ourselves from pandemic infection is for many of us a daily fact of life. Perhaps that means a cheap disposable mask, but there’s no reason that has to be the case. It’s easy to make more durable masks that can be washed and re-used time and time again, and our Hackaday colleague [Kristina Panos] has shared her pattern and workflow to help you do it.

Her pattern isn’t a complex cut-out but a simple rectangle, and the trick of sewing them together and flipping them inside out makes for a very tidy result. With three pleats pressed in and the elastic sewn up the result is a mask that’s neat, attractive, effective, and cheap, which is a win in our book.

It’s worth repeating her important point that these are not for use in medical environments, instead they’re the standard street-wear aerosol catchers we’re all used to. This isn’t the first time we’ve looked at masks here at Hackaday, or indeed though [Kristana]’s are by far the tidier neither is it first time one of us has made a mask. We looked at them in depth last year in our surviving the pandemic as a hacker series.